Maintaining clean water, soil, and air has become a global challenge. Our bioenergy group are engaged in multidisciplinary research and education of sustainable environmental engineering.
We have been active in the fields of cost-effective bioenergy production and harvest from wastes, real-time environmental monitoring technology, and low-cost natural degradation processes.
By elucidating scientific principles and realizing engineering operation, we aim at understanding the fundamental mechanisms of bioelectricity generation at both science and engineering levels,
enhancing the conversion efficiency of wastes to electricity, and finally scaling up the self-sustainable cost-effective natural and engineering systems in real-world application.

Dr. Li has supervised 8 Ph.D students and 10 Master students (Plan A research). She has broadly collaborated with researchers internationally and in the States.
Dr. Li has about 80 peer-reviewed journal papers, 35 invited talks, and 100 technical presentations. Her research has been funded by NSF, ONR, EPA, USGS, NYSERDA, WERF, and UConn Foundation. Currently,
Dr. Li serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Environmental Engineering and Clean: Soil, Air, Water.

Dr. Li has been awarded “Outstanding Graduate Adviser Award, School of Engineering, UConn” and “Woman of Innovation. Research Innovation and Leadership,
the Connecticut Technology Council (CTC)”. Her students have won several national and regional awards, including “Doctorate Research Fellowship,
American Society of Electrochemistry”, “Outstanding Graduate Student (Environmental Engineering), New England Water Environmental Association (NEWEA)”,
and “Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award (Environmental Engineering), UConn”.